The present invention relates to an image diagnostic method, an image diagnostic apparatus, and an image diagnostic program.
One example of a patient diagnostic method which has been used is a pathological diagnosis, where a sample of pathologically changed tissue and cells (a pathological sample) extracted from the body of a patient is attached to a glass slide, and is diagnosed using a microscope. The characteristics of the pathologically changed area observed in the pathological diagnosis include, for example, the characteristics which can be easily checked at low magnification, such as a gland, and the characteristics which can be checked at high magnification, such as an area inside a cell nucleus. In conventional pathological diagnosis using a microscope, the magnification of the microscope is set to low and a rough search of the sample is executed first, then the magnification is set higher in steps, and the specific region to be a reference of diagnosis (ROI) is narrowed down.
Recently pathological diagnosis using an image scanner (image diagnosis), which captures the image of the sample on a slide as an electronic image, is also performed in addition to pathological diagnosis using a microscope. In the case of the image diagnosis, an image is created at a magnification not greater than the magnification used for imaging, by down-sampling from the electronic image (pathological image) on the entire side including the sample captured at high magnification.
In the image diagnosis, as described in Patent Document 1 below, it is common that the entire pathological image is divided into predetermined-sized blocks, and the ROI is analyzed in each block, and in multiple resolution analysis where the resolution of the image is changed in steps as well, [the entire area] is often divided into 4, 16 or into another integral multiple number. The size of the block to be the target of the image processing is normally limited by the processing capability of the hardware, such as the CPU and storage, and by the resolution of a display device, such as a monitor.    [Patent Document 1] Patent Publication JP-A-2009-009290
In the case of performing image diagnosis using the image obtained at a fixed magnification, however, a problem is that it is difficult to confine the area corresponding to pathological change in the pathological image within a practical image size at a magnification appropriate for diagnosis, if the above mentioned processing based on a predetermined block size is used. In other words, if the fixed magnification is lower than the magnification appropriate for diagnosis, the entire area corresponding to the pathological change in the pathological image cannot be confined to the image size or to a one block size in some cases. On the other hand, if the fixed magnification is higher than the magnification appropriate for diagnosis, the entire area corresponding to the pathological change in the pathological image cold be confined only to a small area within the image size or one block size.